The Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right Tries to Evolve

It’s all Steve Bannon’s fault. Three months into the Trump presidency, many in the Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right are in full rebellion against the term, and, ironically, many believe their acknowledged leader, currently President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, gave it currency in the first place.

Trump’s election, and Bannon’s ascendance, seemed likely to make the term a badge of pride, and a blow against political correctness. But that’s far from what happened. In my reporting on the right over the months of Trump’s presidency, almost nothing could make my sources more infuriated than affixing them with the alt-right label. “I just think we have to be very careful about this kind of thing, [to] the extent that people want to describe that racism and anti-Semitism and all that kind of stuff,” said Jeffrey Lord, CNN commentator and Trump surrogate. “I mean, there’s just not room for that kind of stuff in the conservative movement, period. Not under any circumstances, ever.”

VIDEO: Trump vs. Political Correctness

The alt-right label had been in use for years, partly to describe a vivid, largely online subculture of trolls who reveled in their racialist ugliness, often claiming it was an antidote to the reign of political correctness, which they saw as ruining the country. Populist nationalism joined hands with white supremacism and immature 4Chan trolls, borrowing its language from the latter and a deliberate, ironically blasphemous embrace of the former. Whether it was a belief system, a fully formed ideology, or a form of rhetoric, a way of poking at the nostrums and sacred cows of liberalism, was left deliberately murky.

Last summer, in an interview Bannon gave to Mother Jones during the Republican National Convention, Bannon allowed the movement to be pinned down. He called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right.” The phrase multiplied exponentially after he became Trump’s campaign chairman, catapulting the movement into the mainstream. Used to fighting a guerrilla war, now the alt-right was in the open—and defending the ugliness became a lot harder.

Several people I spoke to thought that Bannon’s comment was not meant to be taken seriously. “I think he was being his provocateur self there,” said Lord, who himself scrambled from the label, and said that Bannon had approached him once about writing for the site. “I think he probably saw it as an anti-Establishment group, which it decidedly is, and there’s lots of us who think being anti-Establishment has considerable merit. But just because they might share a strand of a belief here doesn’t make it an endorsement.”

Milo Yiannopoulos, as a Breitbart columnist, was the most recognizable face of the alt-right’s ugliness-as-provocation, though he never fully embraced the term. Now he’s become a poster child for its struggles, after remarks emerged suggesting he condoned pedophilia (Yiannopoulous apologized for the tone of his comments, reiterated that he abhors sexual abuse, and subsequently resigned from the site). Yiannopoulos gives the Bannon interview similar weight in the history of the movement, though characteristically, he blames the media for what transpired. “What I think he meant by that, was ‘alt-right’ defined broadly, as the movement that propelled Trump to power, and that Breitbart was one of the places that they come to read news that is not completely opposed to their point of view,” Yiannopoulos said. “Calling it the platform for the alt-right, and defining the alt-right as white supremacy, is a journalistic trick, designed to pretend that what Bannon was saying was, if you’re a white supremacist, come to Breitbart for your news.”

Milo Yiannopoulos at the Republican National Convention in July 2016.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Before his exile from Breitbart, Yiannopoulos had identified himself as a “fellow traveler” of the movement, implying an overlap on some issues, and a rejection on others. When I spoke to him, however, he had scrambled even further away. “Now the term alt-right has come to mean something else, and therefore, that’s what it means now,” he said. “Whereas I may have considered myself previously a fellow traveler on some issues with the alt-right, the alt-right as the word is used today . . . I have nothing to do with it, and no fondness for it, and no interest in being associated with it.”

If a lawmaker campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, the alt-right, whatever it is these days, is trying to pivot from campaigning in bathroom graffiti to governing in the foreign language of diplomatic tact and deliberate restraint. A movement that spent years on the attack now has to learn to defend.

The term “alt-right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, was created in 2008 by Richard Spencer to describe a strain of white nationalism that rejected every mainstream conservative view and pushed to preserve Western civilization from, in his words, a “left-right dialectic...”

It was Yiannopoulos, along with fellow Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, who tried to stitch together a bigger tent for the movement. In their essay, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” the self-proclaimed “Jewish gay” and a “mixed-race Breitbart reporter” laid out the four groups they believed made up the amorphous blob of a movement fueling Trump’s rise: identity politics-loathing intellectuals, migrant-wary “natural conservatives,” the twentysomething-year-old-white-man “meme team,” and, of course, the militaristic, white-supremacist “1488ers.” While Yiannopoulos and Bakhari attempted to push the 1488ers away from the rest of the group and patted the memelords on the head, they still placed them under the same tent as the normal populist-nationalists. “There are a myriad of agreements between its supporters over what they should build,” they wrote, “but virtual unity over what they should destroy.”

But no one sees the alt-right as four groups; they see it as one group. “To my mind, ‘alt-right’ always carries with it self-conscious racialist politics,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a harsh critic of Trump and the Republican Party’s racialist embrace. “I would not use it to describe people who oafishly, and often without self-awareness, engage in racial dog-whistling. I’d say that what the alt-right people do is take the unconscious and make it conscious.”

Ever since last summer, almost everyone in the movement has been trying, and mostly failing, to get out from under the tent. Of all the trolls profiled by Politico in January, only Spencer would wear the label. Yiannopoulos, who had yet to fall, had pushed himself away from the term, but it did little good. “The press did such a good job at defining it as white supremacy, that the only people who embrace it are the white supremacists,” he said.

In a way, the problem of the Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right in the Trump era is precisely the same as Donald Trump’s problem: words matter. A Hawaii district judge halted Trump’s revised travel ban for its “religious animus,” specifically citing Trump’s previous provocative statements during the campaign. Stephen Miller, a former Breitbart columnist turned White House aide, embarrassed the Trump administration with a few problematic TV appearances and disappeared from the airwaves when his comments were used by the Hawaii judge. Even Breitbart itself began to go mainstream, disclosing its investors and masthead to the Senate Press Gallery when they were denied credentials, and passively letting its radical, “burn it all down” writers leave.

Yiannopolous, of course, sees a bright future for his brand of conservative culture, whatever it’s called. “I think the next 30 years in culture is going to be defined by a colossal pushback in political correctness, which was part of what this movement was about. Libertarianism and punk is coming back now in the form of “Make America Great Again” hats and conservative comedians and personalities. That’s not going anywhere. But the particular, specific word alt-right, the media’s ruined it as a useful term to describe what’s happening.”

Frum, for his part, doesn’t blame Bannon; he blames Trump, the tentpole of the alt-right’s big tent. “He attracted people who just liked bullying. He attracted people whose primary interest was seeing women’s place in society reduced. He attracted people who were nihilistic and hungry for destruction. And he attracted a very small number—there aren’t so many of these—of people who are self-consciously racialist. And that last group is what Richard Spencer called the alt-right.”

Conservatives of many stripes are rushing to get out of the tent. But getting out is a lot harder than getting in.

Is this an endearing moment of Donald squeezing Eric’s cheeks, or Donald checking to see if his thoroughbred son’s teeth are healthy?

Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donald’s 50th birthday party.

Photo: BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.

Young Eric attends the U.S. Open in 1991, making one of the few public appearances without shellacked hair.

Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

A 10-year-old Eric is not as camera-ready as his mother Ivana. He’ll get there one day.

Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

Don Jr., 38, and Barron, 10, share an inter-generational fist-bump at the Republican National Convention.

Photo: By Carlo Allegri/REUTERS.

Eric and Don Jr., for once not wearing slicked-back hair, pay their respects to their dear father.

Photo: by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.

Photo: BY PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE.

Is this an endearing moment of Donald squeezing Eric’s cheeks, or Donald checking to see if his thoroughbred son’s teeth are healthy?

by Ron Galella/WireImage.

Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donald’s 50th birthday party.

BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.

Young Eric attends the U.S. Open in 1991, making one of the few public appearances without shellacked hair.

by Ron Galella/WireImage.

A 10-year-old Eric is not as camera-ready as his mother Ivana. He’ll get there one day.

by Ron Galella/WireImage.

As Ivanka practices looking gorgeous at her father’s 50th birthday, a 12-year-old Eric appears displeased at his choice of tie.

by Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.

Eric and Donald at a basketball game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 2007.

BY JAMES DEVANEY/WIREIMAGE.

Don junior in Briarcliff Manor, New York, 2014.

BY BOBBY BANK/WIREIMAGE.

A 23-year-old Eric attempts to smile. He’ll get there one day.

by M. Von Holden/WireImage.

Donald disapproved of Don Jr. proposing to model Vanessa Haydon using an engagement ring provided by a New Jersey jeweler who wanted publicity. “You have a name that’s hot as a pistol,” said Trump, a man who put said name on everything from steaks to playing cards.

by Dave Allocca/StarPix/REX/Shutterstock.

It is unknown whether Eric Trump eventually killed this animal for sport.

by Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images.

Don Jr., and baby Barron at the unveiling of their father’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Barron is either throwing his fists in the air in celebration of his father’s accomplishments, or is waving for help.

by Hubert Boesl/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.

We presume that this is Don Jr. impersonating his sister Ivanka at the Eric Trump Golf Tournament in 2014.

by Bobby Bank/WireImage.

A 9-year-old Barron already has his father’s eyes and princely smirk.

by Debra L Rothenberg/FilmMagic.

At a campaign event in Las Vegas, December 2015.

FROM VISIONS OF AMERICA/UIG/GETTY IMAGES.

Don Jr., 38, and Barron, 10, share an inter-generational fist-bump at the Republican National Convention.

By Carlo Allegri/REUTERS.

Eric and Don Jr., for once not wearing slicked-back hair, pay their respects to their dear father.

by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.